There are some excellent comments here, so I'll just add my particular flavour.
I think using Kubernetes effectively in 2025 is more about what you _don't_ use than what you _do_ use. As an early stage startup you can get a long way with no RBAC, no network policies, no auto-scalers, and even no stateful workloads. You can use in-cluster metrics metrics and logging before you need to turn to Prometheus, Loki, etc. Use something managed like AWS EKS.
Try to solve your problems first by taking away, and only if that isn't feasible then start adding. Plain old Deployments will get you a long way.
Now this next bit is going to sound like a pitch, and that's because it is – but when those free credits start running out, your bill starts reaching mid-four-figures, and you start thinking about your first DevOps hire, _call us_. Just for 30 minutes. We can migrate you out your cloud infra and onto a nice spacious bare metal k8s cluster, and we'll become your 24/7 on-call DevOps team. We'll get woken up in the night when things break, not you. And core-for-core it will cost a lot less than AWS.
The fact that we can do all that is a testament to how expensive AWS really is. K8s is a good choice now if you keep it simple, positions you well for growth in the future, and for a cluster under a couple of hundred cores it is going to be pretty economical to run it in the public cloud.
I think using Kubernetes effectively in 2025 is more about what you _don't_ use than what you _do_ use. As an early stage startup you can get a long way with no RBAC, no network policies, no auto-scalers, and even no stateful workloads. You can use in-cluster metrics metrics and logging before you need to turn to Prometheus, Loki, etc. Use something managed like AWS EKS.
Try to solve your problems first by taking away, and only if that isn't feasible then start adding. Plain old Deployments will get you a long way.
Now this next bit is going to sound like a pitch, and that's because it is – but when those free credits start running out, your bill starts reaching mid-four-figures, and you start thinking about your first DevOps hire, _call us_. Just for 30 minutes. We can migrate you out your cloud infra and onto a nice spacious bare metal k8s cluster, and we'll become your 24/7 on-call DevOps team. We'll get woken up in the night when things break, not you. And core-for-core it will cost a lot less than AWS.
The fact that we can do all that is a testament to how expensive AWS really is. K8s is a good choice now if you keep it simple, positions you well for growth in the future, and for a cluster under a couple of hundred cores it is going to be pretty economical to run it in the public cloud.
PS. Link in bio